Page 10 of Montana Falls
With that lovely message, he hopped into the back of his truck and the trio sped away without a care in the world. Unlike the rest of us, who were standing there just as the police screeched to a stop.
Fuck.
Again.
Chapter Three
Ihad never raced away from cops before, for real. Sure, I’d been caught driving ‘dangerously’ by more than a few over the years, but they’d never done more than flash their lights and then stop the second I sped off. They never bothered chasing me, and I was sure they’d just decided I wasn’t worth the effort. Not when I was – and I said this as a humble brag – a fucking great driver.
But the same could not be said for the English police, who were determined to get to me, despite how badly I was trying to get away.
Fuck me.
They were chasing us. Relentlessly. Quickly and with some modicum of skill. Sure, I could beat them. I swerved around bends, took corners way too sharp, and barely touched my brakes. Our speed was well above the limit as I weaved inbetween cars and at one point drove the wrong way down a street, pretending the other cars beeping at me were invisible.
Iwasbeating the cops. I would always beat them. But it didn’t fill me with the same amount of joy as it had done for most of my life. No. I was worried. A little nervous.
Scared.
Last time I’d been in a car, without enough seats for everyone, hadn’t ended so well. My dad’s death. Kody almost dying. Sapphire’s kidnapping and torture. Me getting shot in the shoulder and having John fucking O’Malley put his gun to my head. All of it that went wrong that day. All the horrible, traumatic, bullshit things that stilled played on my mind like a fucked up movie each time I dared to go to sleep.
So yeah, I was scared. Just a bit. Even more so considering we’d been driving away for a handful of minutes, and it still didn’t look like the cops were giving up. If anything, more cars kept appearing, and in one precarious spot, I’d had to turn at the last second and cut across a patch of grass, to avoid driving over some tire spikes they’d put on the floor to catch me.
Through it all, I couldn’t take my eyes off the road for the most part. So it was a good thing that Sapphire sat on Logan’s lap in the passenger seat and had her hand on my thigh. If I hadn’t been so sure she was present and relatively safe, I doubted I would have been able to stop myself from glancing at her, desperate to make sure she wasn’t gone. My brain would have been locked onto her and all the horrible things that had happened the last time we’d been in a slightly familiar situation, and I would have probably fucked up and crashed like an idiot.
I could have ruined everything for us all, by either killing one of us, or getting us arrested, and that would have haunted me far more than the last time I felt responsible for messing things up.
The last time that my inability to act faster and spot the bad guys coming had caused so much pain for those I loved, and my dad’s death.
It helped my nerves a bit, too, that my brother kept up a rapid fire commentary on where to drive to and how to get there, as he alternated between searching his phone for information and a constant stream of double-checking that Sapphire was okay, even with the bruises on her neck. No doubt his anxiety was brought on by the fact that we had all seen how close she’d come to being killed by John, without a single one of us close enough to do something about it.
Don’t get me wrong, I was glad someone had saved her. But she wasmine.Ours.We shouldn’t have needed anyone else to step in and protect her when she needed a little backup. We should have been right next to her, doing our fucking jobs.
The same way we were all close enough now to notice as she tensed up and I glanced her way.
“What’s wrong?” Logan asked first, his hands tightening on her waist as he pulled her closer and I forced my eyes to return to the road and the task at hand before I wrapped us all around a fucking pole.
Or more likely, crashed into another car on the ridiculously full and tiny streets that I could just about squeeze the car around.
English roads were horrifically tiny. I had no clue how they ever drove anywhere.
“I just had a bad thought about Shannon.” Sapphire sighed. “I wondered if she knew John was coming somehow because this whole thing feels… feels planned, I guess. As though things were already known to her and maybe John that we don’t understand?”
“You think she killed herself so he couldn’t murder her or something?” I looked in the mirror to see how close the nearestpolice car was, and saw as Kody leaned forward in his seat, hand reaching out for her like he needed to touch her too whilst he spoke. “Or that she knew he was coming already and wanted to avoid him?”
“Maybe both. And I would understand a little because he would not be kind when he killed her. It would have been weeks and painful.” Sapphire sighed again. “But she left her children to him? She just left them to be taken or hurt or whatever John came for? That is the thing that is… that is angering me if it was true, and confusing me, too. Seeing as she made so much effort to save the twins all those years ago.”
“I get it. It’s a shitty thing to do if it’s true,cica.” Kody’s hand appeared between the chairs, linking with Sapphire’s. “She should have been helping her kids, not leaving them for him. But we don’t know if she actually did that. Maybe there was something else going on.”
“My mama was tortured for me for hours on end.” Sapphire turned a little, her voice shaking just enough to make me want to pull over and hug her and then get frustrated that I couldn’t. “She died to save me and if I ever have children, I would do the same for them with happiness. So why did Shannon not do it? Why did she put a gun to her head and leave her babies behind? Was she a coward? Or was something worse waiting for her if she lived?”
There were a dozen different options, but it didn’t matter in the end. We wouldn’t be able to figure it out because Shannon was dead and nobody else could tell us what happened. Even Hades: she was either going to be too traumatized, or hadn’t seen enough to tell us a thing. Or maybe she had, but that still wouldn’t help.
None of us knew what was in Shannon’s head. None of us would ever know the truth.
“Maybe she didn’t know John was coming, and it was unrelated. Or maybe she thought he would go easier on the kids if she wasn’t there?” Logan murmured.
“Or maybe she took the easier way out and she didn’t give a shit about what happened afterwards,” Price chimed in. “We’re never going to know, and I don’t think it matters in the end. She’s dead and we have her children - we won’t let John get them.”
